My experience with networking, and .NET to be blogged here. Since I dont have an always online connection at home, the posts may not be live enough and perhaps even sporadic.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Tax SMS

There's a thread these days on Telecom Grid Pakistan mailing list about the proposed 20 paisa per SMS tax. A poster hinted on how cheap SMS make them the ideal easy way of mobilizing a mob, for instance, in the long march case. The post as well as my reply are way off topic, so I'm posting a reply here.

May I suggest that roads, railways, and telecom are the enablers of growth and development. Branding SMS as the easiest mass mobilization instrument is a flawed argument. For that matter, cars and trucks have been used to carry explosives. Shall we ban them, too? Notice how this discussion is headed way off topic. Every facility has a way to be misused. You can't justify taxing it to lower the risk. Besides, if the government is going to play foul, they should be willing to see the mobs on the streets. To be fair, they haven't seen anything.I would like to see a million percent tax on cigarettes, cigars, tobacco in general, paan, chewing gum. Those are non essential items. Instead of making wheat, onion and phone calls more expensive, tax these items by the millions of percent. These are luxuries, as are the beamers and the mercs. Oh, but the industrialists would halt that move fearing loss of revenue. We've seen several examples lately of when the ministers talked about rationalizing the prices of local cars (Suzuki Moron, for instance). What did we get? Nada.Again, if the telecom sector fears loss of revenue, they'd try to fill a few pockets to scrap this bill. But the telecom sector, apparently, isn't doing well anyway.

Deaf and dumb, but they're not dumb, as in idiots. They're very smart as per their own, albeit short-term, interests. Taken into confidence? Of course, not! You see the idea is this: You scare them. They come running to you, like they're planning to do now. Then you say, "well, you haven't been paying your citizenship dues." They ask, "what citizenship dues?" You say, "Well, you want to survive in Pakistan, and you're not filling our pockets. We've got expenses, you know." You go back and discuss amongst each other and decide how much you can fill the politicians' pockets with. The same was done in the case of a previous government faking to try to rationalize prices of locally manufactured cars.